Poor Little Oto's

[silkiechicken]

I feel sorry for my little otos. They cohabitate with guppies and I feed them both at night an hr before lights out. The otos get about 10 min of peace with their algae flake and then on comes guppies with their perpetual stomachs to steal the flake once gobbling up all their floating food. I even feed the otos behind the plants to give them a head start. But alas, they end up sharing their flake with the guppies.

How do you all go about this? Go ahead and feed the otos after light's out?

 

[Corleone]

My otos won't even touch food like that, at least not before everything else grabs it - I've seen platys carry a whole algae wafer around for several minutes trying to figure out how to eat it. In the end, my bristlenose gets most of them. I put a bit of cucumber or zucchini in the tank overnight. The otos are pretty much on it constantly. Other fish pick at it, but it's too big to carry off.

 

[silkiechicken]

I've heard that they won't touch them, by even though they spend the day scouring the plants and walls, they hone right in on the flake from the whole tank and surround it within a few minutes. Oddly enough, these little guys didn't have any dying off problems and were just plain "easy" too so maybe I just got lucky. They must be eating something, because they all got those big round bellies. A few just down right look fat from the top.